Maintaining the wholeness and wholesomeness of the sleep/wake cycle day-to-day and month-to-month is essential to preserve personal well-being and happiness as well as the productivity and good order of society at large. In an ideal world, the rhythm of the sleep/wake cycle would be governed by the natural order of each days sunrise and sunset. The artificial routines of modern personal and social life, however, have eclipsed the rhythms of nature making it the more difficult to wake up and go to sleep at appointed times the more the exigencies of one's own routines are in conflict with the natural cycle of things.
A variety of devices have been devised in the effort to control the fundamental sleep and wake rhythms of the sleep/wake cycle in the face of the irregularities imposed thereon by the demands of modern life. Representative of such devices are the Sunrise Simulation Sleep Mask of United States patent application publication 2012/0137406 to Hide, dated Jun. 7, 2012; the Programmable Mask for Waking An individual of United States patent application publication 2007/0002692 to Van Brunt, dated Jan. 4, 2007; and the Relaxation Inducing Sleep Mask of U.S. Pat. No. 8,852,073 to Genereux et al., dated Oct. 7, 2014, each incorporated herein by reference. Reference in this connection may also be had to the Neuroon Intelligent Sleep Mask having a removable “smart pack,” commercially available at https://neuroon.com.
The Hide and Van Brunt devices include a sleep mask having white LEDs and a controller cooperative therewith to wake the user in the morning with a rising, time-phased increase in intensity of white light. The controller can be a component integrally built into the mask and/or connected to the mask via a Bluetooth link. The Neuroon Intelligent Sleep Mask has a wake-up sunrise sequence and includes a Bluetooth connection to a mobile phone application used to determine control parameters, and provides different biometric sensors that are used to collect data on sleep time and states. A brightening sequence to provide controlled awakening from a nap is also disclosed by the Napwell Eye Mask Napping System, commercially available at http://napwell.com.
The heretofore known devices and techniques, however, have been disadvantageous in one or more of the following particulars. The cost has not been desirably low enough, due to the cost incurred by inclusion of time and alarm displays and multiple time and alarm set buttons and switches and costly electronics modules and Bluetooth communication interfaces, which has pushed their availability beyond the bounds of affordability for many consumers; the wake-up and go-to-sleep techniques employed thereby have not been entirely effective to simulate the sunrises and sunsets of nature, which has limited their ability to assimilate the sleep/wake cycle to the natural order and rhythms of nature; they have been uncomfortable to wear, or too heavy or cumbersome to use; and/or the utility of the heretofore known eye masks has been limited by the fact that once they became soiled during use, it is not been generally possible to maintain hygiene beyond superficial cleaning, which sometimes required a replacement product be acquired or the compromise made to continue to use sometimes even badly soiled eye masks.